It's being held over at the spacious Nicholls & Clarke Building on Shoreditch High Street, and has been tightly curated so that you have a real sense of what you're looking at - which is a huge help when you're faced with such a vast quantity of work.

It's always interesting to see what the visual vibe is each year - this year there was a lot of work that had the scent of the AA Print Studio about it (sometimes huge stinking whiffs of it in fact). That's fairly natural, and just part of the ebb and flow of what's hip in the design industry at any given time... but we hope that those students will find time to develop their own distinct visual language.

We'd been invited to pick out our favourite piece from the show for the annual Joss Turley award, so got a chance to have a fairly decent wander round before the beer really started flowing. Here are just a few of the faces we think are worth keeping an eye on:

Maria Gruzdeva has put together a frankly beautiful, hugely polished book about the Yuri Gagarin Russian State Science Research Cosmonauts Training Centre (also known as the Star City) - a secretive military research facility where cosmonauts have lived and trained from the 1960s onwards. The book features her stunning documentary photography (above and top) from the Centre, as well as a wealth of archive material. It's a hugely substantial piece of work, really brilliant.

We were blown away by Brendan Olley's vast photographic prints, taken on a large-format camera on a trip to Svalbard, the world's most northern town, sitting 300 miles from the North Pole. Brendan says the work "identifies the oddity of human behavior in relation to the landscape. Playgrounds and basketball courts are engulfed by snow and made redundant. Cars become reclaimed by the planet until eventually they become inseparable. It brings into question the reasons why one would wish to occupy this isolated place."

They're truly fantastic pictures, and you really need to see them at their actual size to get the full effect.

Jamie Hearn has created a beautiful pair of screenprints, one showing simplified household products stripped of their lettering, and then a second print showing just the lettering, which he's hand drawn. Really delicious, and he's also documented the work in a rather fine book (above). Great stuff.

We really liked Helen Lovelee's series of hand-drawn prints inspired by traditional Aboriginal philosophy - this one reads: "To stay warm on a cold desert night sleep between two small fires and close to your dog". Which sounds mighty fine.

We were also really taken with Chihiro Sasaki's whimsical illustrations, particularly her series "The Territory of Human Being", which looked at the invisible barriers people form to distance themelves from others. The illustrations have a really distinctive and charming style. Dead good.

Okay, full disclosure, we've had Ed in here on a placement, so we already think his work is great - and he didn't disappoint with this series of beautiful letterpressed prints. Tasty bit of framing too Ed.

The clever kids at Wallpaper* magazine have done some mighty clever technological tinkering and created an online app that lets you design your very own one-off cover for their upcoming August issue - though you'll need to move quickly - designs have to be created by Tuesday 8 June.

The app is hugely intuitive, with a selection of elements to drag and drop: texts from Anthony Burrill (including WE MADE THIS, handily for us), shapes from James Joyce, textures by Nigel Robinson, patterns by Kam Tang, and images by Hort. You can customise things to a fair degree, particularly by layering, scaling and colouring the elements. Dead good.

Our first response on seeing them was "One-eyed aliens? Phew! Not a cuddly lion."

They're far closer to fully realised characters than we were expecting, and slightly bonkers, which is great. There's a touch of Al Capp's The Shmoo in there, a fair bit of Futurama's Leela, and also a bit of Umberto Boccioni's magnificent Unique Forms of Continuity in Space.

They're obviously styled to be emblematic of loads of different stuff - Wenlock's head represents the three podium positions, as well as a taxi light, and the Olympic stadium roof; while Mandeville's head has three prongs representing the Paralympic emblem. Both of them have eyes that apparently double as cameras, and they are built for online customisation, so that people can create their own versions (here's hoping for physical versions of that customisation, a bit like Kid Robot's Munnys). We'd like to see an unembellished version, a bit cleaner, simpler.

And of course, they come in life-size versions too - which we reckon might scare the hell out of younger kids...

Overall though, we reckon these two are (relatively) cool - perhaps not up there with Jamie Hewlett's Monkey animations appropriated by the BBC for its coverage of the Beijing Olympics, but not a million miles away. What d'you think?

One of our favourite illustrators, Jimmy Turrell, stopped by the studio recently to show us some of his latest work, which combines handmade collage, drawing and painting alongside digital mark making.

He's worked with clients such as Nike, Channel 4, The Guardian, The New York Times, XL Recordings, and Dazed & Confused; with more recent projects such as the D&AD winning book cover for Heart Agency's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (designed by Pentagram) as well as promotional artwork for Glastonbury 2009.

While he was here we took the opportunity to ask him a few questions about his working process.

WMT: A lot of urban/street artists are beginning to make careers out of selling prints and originals of their work. Is that a road you'd like to go down? (Jimmy already sells a few prints online.)

JT: Yeah - it's definitely a part of my work I want to develop more. The way things have moved over the last ten years with illustrators selling their work from their own sites and through online galleries - it's broken down the boundaries of what it actually means to be an artist.

WMT: Can you describe the process you go through on an average piece of work, from briefing to finished piece?

JT: Basically I sit down with my sketchbook and flick through old books and mags to try and get a feel for the piece. I’ll then start cutting things out and sketching and I’ll begin to make a visual scrapbook of ideas and themes. Once I’ve got my primary ideas fleshed out I’ll begin the drawing/painting/collage process proper and then I’ll scan the work into the computer and continue from there.

WMT: Is there anyone you'd particularly like to work with?

JT: I've been lucky enough to work with some of the companies I've always respected (Intro, Pentagram, Colette, XL) but it would be fantastic to work with one of the greats - Saville, Glaser or Hipgnosis.

WMT: Is there any advice you'd give to someone who's thinking of becoming an illustrator?

JT: Financially it can be a bit of a slog starting off. When the magazine I was working for folded I thought my world had ended and that I’d never work again. In actuality it kicked my arse into gear to start looking down different paths. If you have the talent then it will eventually shine through - so keep at it.

Jimmy's been good enough to let us have a unique hand-made print (below) to give away to one of you lot - it's one of ten he created for The Guardian's Glastonbury 2009 Guide, featuring a mash-up of Lady Gaga, La Roux, Bruce Springsteen and The Prodigy.

The third issue of The Ride Journal has just come out, and as with the previous two issues, it's a sumptuous mix of insightful and deeply personal writing, stunning photography, and fantastic illustrations.

Alistair's feeling dead chuffed, as they've included a piece he wrote about the all-night bike ride called the Dunwich Dynamo, featuring some stunning photos by Joe McGorty.

Illustrator Johanna Basford has been in touch to let us know about an interesting little project she's running over the next couple of days (Wednesday 14 & Thursday 15 October), called Twitter Picture.

She's going to create one of her rather beautiful hand-drawn illustrations, inspired entirely by suggestions from Twitter users (check out @johannabasford), and then do a limited edition of 100 silk-screened prints from the drawing.

Sounds like a smart way to get lots of people to check out her work, and could be an interesting snap-shot of what's going on in the collective consciousness right now...